Tag Archives: Cold War

This movie is wonderful because it’s weird. It’s a fantasy, a monster story, a romance story, a buddy story, a spy story, with a few pornographic scenes and brutal, bloody violence. Then there’s a song and dance number. A couple scenes are fantasy even within the movie’s world. All pulled together into one story and definitely for mature audiences.

The settings are amazingly detailed and beautifully filmed. Set in the early 1960s (Mister Ed and Dobie Gillis play on TVs in the background – in black and white of course), the good-guys befriend each other despite having no hope of better lives in their grim, impoverished city. Most of the story takes place on the night shift, which adds to the darkness. The only bright colors are outside their reality, on a theater’s movie screen.

The military/CIA research facility is dingy and forbidding. No clean white labs here! Instead, a cavernous structure of gray concrete and rusty metal. The movie uses the familiar trope of evil government agents and this is the perfect place for them.

To further praise the visuals, the monster is excellent, even when he stands in full light.

The plot isn’t particularly inventive. Especially in the second half of the movie, things proceeded as I expected, and that wasn’t a problem. I held my breath a couple times wondering how the movie was going to get from point to point. Watching it unfold was thoroughly satisfying.

The villain doesn’t have a mustache, but if he did, he’d be twirling it. There’s a brief attempt in one scene to create some sympathy for him – but, no! I have no sympathy for the villain.

As a final measure of the movie, my husband and I talked about it the entire drive home, sharing the parts we especially noticed, and admiring the way bits came back to tie into the plot later.

No review would be complete without a quibble or two. A character holds a TV Guide, and it’s the modern large-sized magazine instead of the small size I expected. Also, in that dingy government facility, the bathroom has sinks mounted under-counter, under bright marble – that seemed odd, especially when everything else was so beautifully and depressingly “period.”

This movie is different – weird in a good way. If you’re okay with sex and violence (even torture scenes) then I recommend you see The Shape of Water.

From master storyteller, Guillermo del Toro, comes THE SHAPE OF WATER – an other-worldly fable, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of isolation. Elisa’s life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment.

Syfy is launching a mini-series built on Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 1953 book. It won’t debut until December but the buzz has started.

“Utopia, but at what cost?”

There are lots of stories about Utopia making us lazy, and plots based on sinisterly-friendly aliens, so why has Syfy reached back to the mid-20th century for a story?

I read Childhood’s End when I was a kid – I still have a couple pictures in my head from the book – especially of the aliens – but I had to visit Wikipedia for a plot summary. (One of my memories was dead-wrong! My head is a dangerous place to leave information gathering dust for decades.)

Clarke wrote about a world at the height of the US/Soviet Cold War, when nuclear war seemed the most likely way for humanity to exterminate itself, and before the space age – some of his story is now near-ancient history. Will Syfy choose a different time period? A different threat to global survival?

Clarke wove real physics with fantasy, action with wonder and even sadness. Will Syfy take the same approach?

Syfy has been working on the series since April, 2013. The cast has been announced. There’s Charles Danc from Game of Thrones and Ricky Stormgren from Under the Dome. Trekkies (or do you prefer Trekkers?) will remember Colm Meaney from Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (though his career goes far beyond), playing a new character who’s not in the book.

Will a story written half a century ago grab today’s viewers.? I’m an old timer myself with a soft spot for the classics, but I keep reading how science fiction has changed, how today’s readers want something different, how the classic heroes were laughably stiff and movies today need more action, more fights and explosions. Will Clarke’s haunting ending survive the move to Syfy?

I usually find TV and movie adaptations less satisfying than the books they come from, but I think I’ll wait and watch Syfy’s Childhood’s End before I re-read the novel – give it a chance. After all, we live in the 21st century.